Many thanks to Uche for his
thoughts and
code responding to
my
frustration working with XML in Python. If you're reading this because
you want to write good XML code in Python, read
his stuff! He knows
much better than I. And he gives clear guidance: use his Amara if you want
something Pythonic that can deal with XML.

But reading Uche's posts confirms my main point. There are too many
XML choices in Python. And the obvious ones aren't right. Apparently
PyXML isn't what I'm supposed to be using (despite it being the
default when I type import xml on my Debian box), and if you
use it the way the docs say to you're wrong. Urgh!

And while I like what Uche says about Amara,
is this the easy way to say "parse an XML document"?

He explains why all this is necessary for this
example (Amara by default doesn't support
XPath attributes), but it's just this kind of complexity that frustrates me.
Python's strength is that there's a clear, obvious way to do simple
things. But not with XML.